course,
is a continuous take, but in
you use three extremely long shotsthe Evanston Express ride into downtown Chicago, the smokestack, and the two women in bed. Were you conscious of other filmmakers who have worked with long takes?
I was conscious of the early Warhol. I think he made it easier for people to make films like I make. My idea in those scenes was to use duration in three different ways. The first three scenes in the film are the man and the woman saying good-bye; the man walking down the street; then the man entering an,' el station. Next, there's the shot of the express ride. Although the three shots aren't traditional, a somewhat traditional narrative seems to be developing. A man says good-bye to a woman, and he leaves on the el, but then the fourth shot holds for eleven minutes (it's a four-hundred-foot reel), all the way to the end of the el ride. As the minutes go by, you relate to the image differently: at first it seems to be part of the narrative; then it becomes formalistic. That shot is a key to the whole film. In the smokestack shot I do the opposite: I start formalistically and then reintroduce the narrative. The bedroom scene is the same length as the smokestack scene. I wanted to use the same music and see how it would relate to different imagery.
One other question. When I studied the film, it occurred to me that the black guy running the train literally becomes a shadow, which is a major theme in black American literature: the idea that whites just don't see blacks. And the Evanston Express goes over some impoverished black neighborhoods. Is this connection accidental?
The man in the front of the car was an actor. I realized, though, that people who take the Evanston Express to Chicago can get on in Evanston and get off in downtown Chicago, without dealing with anything in between. As I said before, politics creep into my films.
When Larry Gottheim made
[1973], he collected images before he had conceived a structure. Did you start
with a structure in mind?
It was scripted. About eighty percent of it was on paper. Sometimes interesting things happened that weren't scripted, but it didn't grow out of collecting images. That
how I made
.
In both
and
and in
too, you include a shot of the Dad's Root Beer Factory. Were you purposely creating continuity from film to film?
That started when I was writing
and realized that it was an extension of
. I thought, why not take some of those scenes and weave them into
How would you read those scenes if you had seen both films? Would they seem the same? Would they suggest deja vu?
You make small changes, too. In
there's the
Page 234
shot where a truck goes by on a country road and you pan and follow it, then the shadow of a plane comes through the image. In
the middle section was eliminated, and the viewer sees two shots.
That's the only different one. The others are lifted right out of
and put into
.
[1976] seems an attempt to combine techniques explored in Ernie Gehr's
and Michael Snow's
and
.
I was probably influenced by both people. I made
